


sima-sial

by Nemonus



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Age Difference, F/M, No Plot/Plotless, just dramatic geology, no love lost between them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-20
Updated: 2017-06-20
Packaged: 2018-11-16 08:59:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11249877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: Somewhere underneath Sunfall, she had realized that she missed him even though they had never met. Somewhere after Sunfall, he had looked at her with a frank relief that shocked her.





	sima-sial

Every few minutes, a thunderous rumble would mark the crevasse in the mountain shifting. Three of them passed before Sylens turned away from Aloy after he told her he was leaving.  
  
“I have no more questions,” she said, testing the idea out. The enormity of his deception felt distant. He had _created_ the Eclipse. He had set them out like foxes on the prey of the world. He had orchestrated the plan that had created Bahavas, who had stood on a cold, wet mountain while Aloy fought ten men in front of him in a facsimile of the Sun-Ring. Sylens had done all that and … _regretted_ was not the right word. Aloy wasn’t sure which word was.  
  
Sylens stood in the doorway, framed by the metal world.  
  
Nor was she sure that what she felt was regret when she spoke again. “I won’t forget what you gave me. The spear, the armor - gifts that must have been hard to part with from a man who hordes his things in remote caches.”  
  
Sylens shifted his pack on his back. “Those batteries you carry will lead you to better armor than I can give you. Better to use that than hang on to any sentimentality.”  
  
Sentimentality. Was this getting her somewhere? Was this getting to whatever … _loss_ she felt when the ground opened up between them? Somewhere underneath Sunfall, she had realized that she missed him even though they had never met. Somewhere after Sunfall, he had looked at her with a frank relief that shocked her. Their conversations had been different after that, clipped with frustration and warm with the comfort of a fellow traveler in strange lands. As they had learned, Aloy had felt more and more that they stood alone, the only humans with knowledge possessed now by ancient machines. His voice had distracted her.  
  
They had stood on the same ground for such a short amount of time. She did not know when they would again. Did he also understand that they had been drawn to one another by their shared secrets?  
  
“I think the Kestrel armor suits me.” Aloy turned her bare arm to pretend to examine the brace at the wrist. This was how people began, right? Compliment the things that someone else built.  
  
Sylens approached her, reached out his hands for the brace and pulled away again.  
  
“You will need to fit the next one correctly. This was a lucky find, a soldier your size.”  
  
He met her eyes for the duration of the next shake. The mountain had held this shape since the day she was born, and Sylens - he had been trying to find the answer to the mystery of her all along. Aloy touched his cheek. Sylens’ skin felt chapped, rough not with stubble but with pockmark imperfections under skeptical eyes. He turned his head so that she felt the edge of his lips against her palm: a question.  
  
Another answer from the mountain came in a fall of heavier snow behind her, lumps of it hitting the workshop’s awning.  
  
“I re-wove parts of the armor when you left,” she said. “Better it be too tight than too loose in that battle.” She struggled as she thought of the Nora, that pain so raw, so easily removed by a further babbling explanation: “It held while we took back All-Mother, but the joins are not…”  
  
(What a lie. Of course, he would be lying back if he pretended to believe it.)  
  
Sylens moved away from her hand, then caught her wrist and cupped her elbow. Aloy could not have finished her sentence if she tried. She felt other words crowding up, but this was not fear. It felt like clarity, and Sylens pretended to examine the underside of her gauntlet.  
  
“I’m going to touch you," he said. A belated warning, but one he had said before. Aloy nodded.  
  
“This piece?”  
  
“No.”  
  
The fallen snow seemed to catch his eye too as he slid one hand over her shoulder. It was just weight, his fingers testing the feather-shaped spines of metal that gave the Kestrels their fearsome silhouette.  
  
“I’m going to touch you,” she said, and searched for the clasp on the metal bandoleer around his shoulder.  
  
When she found it he took the falling weight of the belt and set it down, gently enough to make just a small noise as it coiled. The sudden distance from him galvanized her further, pushing the clarity into the front of her mind.  
  
When next he looked up at her she touched the black plating above her ribs. His eyes widened, but he bent to examine her armor and found slight loose give in the cords beneath. She ran her hand across the wire threading along the top of his head, surprised anew at the heat radiating from the thin skin. Her breath caught when he braced the fingers of one hand against her stomach, started again as he followed the cord to the threading where her spine met the small of her back. He worked, the mountain groaned, he let out a held breath of his own.  
  
“I felt like a machine,” she murmured. “I’ve cared for people before, but … you take me apart.”  
  
“You aren’t a machine.” He tugged the cords at her back, a hissing sound as they slipped and a slight, cold weight at her hips. All a lie, she knew. Nothing wrong with her armor. She sacrificed her protection while he sacrificed his insistence on practicality, both of them breathing loud and erratic. She thought for a moment of Varl - his eyes like pools, Varl who was her age and who would follow her and wait until both of them understood exactly who Aloy wanted to be. Things would have been much simpler, if she had wanted Varl.  
  
Sylens tightened the cords again. “I need to stitch this.”  
  
Aloy nodded, did not know whether he was looking at that. He moved across the room.  
  
Time rushed, then slowed.  
  
He placed  
  
the pack  
  
down on the metal floor  
  
and moved to the workbench where the spear lay.  
  
Aloy recognized most of the equipment there: knives and scrapers and wire cutters, standard measures distributed by Carja metalworkers. Sylens stood in the dimness and unwound a spool with his back to her.  
  
He wasn’t leaving, she thought as she started to move. The two things were inexorably linked, after all. She had so little time with him, so little acknowledgement of this cold and calculated dance. He stilled as she approached, knowing maybe as well as she did that she would rest her right hand on his and press herself against his back, embracing him from behind for just a moment before she tucked her hand under the fur-lined edge of his shirt. The skin was clammy and flushed, but she pressed her palms over his ribs for a moment, fingers drumming at the hollow underneath. His hand tensed under hers, but he did not protest when she tucked her fingers around his.  
  
An edge backwards, an exploration. She found the extruded cords, Crucible-cords, threaded into his back before she found his spine. An undrawn breath, heat now that she thought might be coming from her own skin.  
  
“I had wondered,” she said.  
  
He sounded almost strangled. “I rescinded …”  
  
“Did you, now.” Whose was this voice that murmured soft? Aloy had not heard it from her mouth before. She found the other arm of the crossroads pattern before she moved away.  
  
He caught her other hand and flipped it roughly. She let him make his own space between her and the shelf, where the useless cords splayed in blue tangles.  
  
“I reassured you when we learned the story about your parentage because my statement was true,” he said, and turned to face her. “And because I missed your voice, and felt that if you fell into a despair as deep as that I might not hear it again.”  
  
“You were about to walk away just as I was starting to know you,” she accused.  
  
He let go of her hand, gentle still. “I don’t expect you to compartmentalize my secrets. I would let all of that happen again if I thought I could restore the archive through it. Don’t let that affect the one time I reassured you.”  
  
“I will go on without you.” Aloy met his eyes. “My story will not end in despair. I don’t expect you to compartmentalize my reactions. Do what you want. After I’ve stopped that signal, I’ll do what I want.”  
  
They looked at one another in the haze of the freedom of their separate vows.  
  
She shuffled forward and kissed him. This time his hands unerringly found the slight gap he had made in the armor at her back, pressing heavy onto her skin. She had never kissed anyone before, and her attempt was precise but cursory. To her surprise his mouth was cold, the hot breath fighting against the snowy air he had been breathing at the altitude of the workshop.  
  
An appraising look, another momentary pause that she now knew was his way of asking for permission. She pushed her hair away from her face, but found it whipping forward again when he grasped her arms and backed her against the workbench. The next kiss, then: her hair in their mouths and her hands again at the threads on his back, and when she leaned back he tucked his legs around hers and kissed her throat.  
  
Cold; cold when the mountain rumbled again, Aloy lost in the words she spoke against his ear. He wanted to hear her story, he wanted to hear anything she would say. Nonsense words, descriptions of places, of machines, making up for the delays and silences and fights, talking of anything except his past and her future (the world’s future), until (cold) they lay on the mat he had thrown in the corner.    
  
She needed to leave, she thought later. The topography of him had become familiar so quickly, and where she lay she could see the crevasse in the mountain just over his shoulders. When she put her arms around him again he flinched, then turned to look at her as if surprised at who he saw.  
  
“Elizabet…” Sylens said.  
  
Aloy’s own words slammed back into her. _You make it really hard to like you._  
  
He continued. “Elizabet would have wanted more for you than this.”  
  
“Why do you think this will stop me from doing anything else I need to do?” Aloy snapped.  
  
She withdrew. He followed her, resting his head against her shoulder. She curled herself against him, cold still. “We have already discussed…that we will go on without one another.”  
  
And what if they didn’t? What if she joined him in his wandering, away from the worship of the Nora and the reconstruction of the Carja?  
  
Sylens shifted to look back at the workbench and the full travel pack he had left there. A long look, some slow decision piecing itself together. There were audio logs over there, she knew, pieces of his guilty history that he had left (raw as skin) for her to read. An exchange, almost, for all of the information he had gathered from her Focus.  
  
“Yes,” he said.  
  
Then he stood, and Aloy turned and grabbed eagerly for her warmest clothes.  
  
Aloy had said what needed to be said before, so when Sylens dressed and left she stood with her arms crossed and thought of him, and when he left it was without a look back.


End file.
